French Presidential candidate Jacques Cheminade challenged France and the world to follow his lead, on Sunday, in the fight against the ruling system of the destructive and predatory global financial oligarchy, in a webcast he delivered from Paris. He said the global rule of this City of London and Wall Street financial oligarchy has resulted in a crisis of civilization in France and the rest of the world.

He stated that he is fighting for an alternative to the other Presidential candidates. The present President, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Socialist Party candidate François Hollande, are not challenging the system, and therefore have no solution to the worsening crisis. In the face of this crisis, he called for the establishment of a new resistance to this system of injustice.

Cheminade demolished the claims that the burgeoning debt had to be paid, and that a combination of inflationary money printing and austerity had to be imposed on the population to solve the problem. He said the financial system has "stolen our lives" by turning the financial system into a vast casino, and that this oligarchy wants to put the next president under its control.

He said that if the dominance of the global oligarchy continues, crises worse than that of 2007-2008 will ensue.

To knock out this financial oligarchy, he called for cutting the banks in half, the way the 1933 Glass-Steagall legislation did this under Franklin Roosevelt. He also called for a Pecora Commission-style investigation of the banks, as was carried out by FDR in 1933. This would eliminate the huge illegitimate debt, making it possible to defend deposit and credit banks, so that it would be possible to rebuild such elements as education, services, and infrastructure, all necessary to restore the nation.

But, he emphasized, this would not be enough. A system of public credit and national banking was necessary for the rebuilding of the nation to succeed. All the pretended solutions to the debt problem, without dealing with how money is created, will only make matters worse.

He demolished the mantra, "the debt must be paid," by pointing to post-World War II Europe and the Soviet Union. In both cases, there were no savings. Europe was rebuilt with credit, and he called for credit to be used to rebuild Europe again today.

Among the features of his campaign program are these:

* Rebuilding education as part of the new frontier in the fight for bringing culture back to the people, giving the population a better capacity to create, instead of the present system which creates administrative elites, while ignoring the rest of the population;

* Government-facilitated investment in cutting edge technologies, because this increases the productivity of society. He emphasized nuclear technology, emphasizing especially the necessity of maintaining the methods that led to the advances in scientific and educational processes that led to the development of nuclear power, so that more advances could be made, ultimately culminating in fusion power and beyond;

* A space program, which will also produce spin-offs for increasing the productivity of society;

* Overthrowing the various laws and regulations that made it impossible for the state to finance development, as well as the mechanisms that make it possible to speculate against state debt;

April 14th, 2012 The following was released by the Cheminade in 2012 presidential campaign on April 14, 2012:

As early as April 8, I was the first in the Presidential campaign to warn of the risk of the coming risk of a speculative attack on the French debt. In fact, as of April 16, Eurex will begin marketing new futures contracts for high-leveraged gambling on the French debt (FOAT - French long-term bonds), which is likely to lead to an explosion of the interest rates at which France borrows.

The media hype of the past days over such a potential speculative attack cannot be reduced to an initiative aimed at supporting the reelection of Nicolas Sarkozy. Believing so would amount to seriously miscalculating the depth of the financial crisis, and the determination of the financial markets operating out of the City and Wall Street to make France - and more generally all nation-states - crawl.

The financial markets are worried about the maneuvering room that the next President of the Republic will have, in particular if it is a socialist President with a majority in both chambers. What they most fear is the pressure than the people and the socialist rank-and-file will bring to bear on French leaders.

In front of the expected turbulence and the war the financial markets are declaring on France, our country, thanks to her history and the nature of her institutions, is neither helpless nor unarmed.

Prohibiting short sales, as some candidates have proposed, is by no means sufficient. After the second round of the Presidential election [May 6], the following measures must be urgently taken:

· In order to break the financial stranglehold, a Glass-Steagall act must be adopted as quickly as possible. It must involve a real separation between investment banks and insurance companies on the one hand, and deposit and credit banks serving private people and companies on the other. A mere separation of the banks' activities while they remain under the same roof, is insufficient.

· A parliamentary investigative committee shall be set up simultaneously, and provided with investigatory and subpoena powers, in order to prepare the separation of the banks and to study their speculative activities.

· The state shall protect the necessary functions of deposit and credit banks. Investment banks that have speculated and lost shall not be bailed out and may be put into bankruptcy proceedings.

· All the debt created by the financial system over the past decades, whether public or private, cannot be paid back. We need a thorough review and sorting-out to determine which debts are legitimate and which are not, such as gambling debts.

In that way, we can get out of the blind belief in a balanced budget, which was denounced by Jean Zay, a minister of the Popular Front. Such urgent measures are a precondition for a public productive credit policy allowing the funding for a policy of great projects and public works, which is the only means of ensuring the future of France, of her economy and her public services. Otherwise, the economic crisis and social ravages that ensue will be irremediable.

Should the next President of the Republic fail to take such measures to rein in the finances, he will be responsible before history for the subsequent financial take-downs. The more votes I get on the evening of the first round of the election, the greater the pressure on the next President of the Republic to adopt this road map, and the stronger my own voice will be in the combat to come.

Eurex Speculation on French Debt Creates Uproar

The huge controversy over the new financial instrument created by the Frankfurt-based Eurex exchange on March 21, and which will go public on April 16, is forcing center-stage the issue of the power the financial markets exert over France, as denounced by Jacques Cheminade, and the need for a complete overhaul of the banking system. Cheminade was the first to come out and expose the danger (although most media reports fail to mention his intervention), followed by Left Front candidate Mélenchon, the Greens, and Front National candidate Marine Le Pen.

On April 14, Socialist François Hollande had to join in, and stated that, if elected President, he would ask the German authorities to cancel the introduction of those contracts, as it "encourages speculation against the countries concerned." When a journalist countered that the German government doesn't have the power to do so, he said that that was precisely what was at stake now in Europe. Hollande also said that certain financial products should simply be outlawed, in particular if "the product is not linked to the value of a good, it should not be speculated on."